iPhone 5 Parts: Motherboard Revealed

It has been said that the computer inside the iPhone 4S is four times more powerful than the one in NASA’s Curiosity rover currently rolling around Mars. How much more powerful then is the iPhone 5’s tiny — really, really small — computer? Come inside for the iPhone 5 motherboard photos. iPhone 5 parts, who can get enough?

“GuoJun1984,” a poster on Chinese forum WeiPhone, has put up photos of the iPhone 5 motherboard and it is, if nothing else, impressively small.

So, someone has come up with a PCB, largely obscured by shielding that could plausibly be an iPhone 5 part, so what?

Well, the lads at NoWhereElse (France) did a bit of finagling to show that the motherboard pictured above is actually (large pinch o’ salt) a pretty good fit for the iPhone 5 unibody back panel photos that have popped up on the web.

Further, although it is shrouded in shielding, this iPhone 5 motherboard shows an extra wireless connection port, which could be for stronger Wi-Fi — 802.11ac could be arriving at any time — or for 4G.

No, that doesn’t prove anything, but many of these purported iPhone 5 parts — see more here and here — certainly do appear credible and they do seem to fit together in a credible ways. This point is underscored by iFixYouri (via 9 to 5 Mac), which has created a diagram that pulls together the various iPhone 5 parts revealed to date into a coherent whole and coherent it is.

Back in the day, if one posted photos of real, unreleased Apple products or parts thereof Apple legal would issue a takedown notice — an effective if backhanded way of confirming the validity of leaks.

Then again, given Apple’s unmatched marketing savvy, who would be surprised if it turned out that Phil Schiller was behind half or more the leaks? I, for one, wouldn’t be surprised in the least…